How do we make creative things? For centuries researchers have been fascinated with understanding how designers think and create. Over the course of design research, which spans over half a century, various ways for studying the design mind have been developed. This short article provides an overview of the major three generations of research into designers’ minds, and the main tools/technologies used by each.

1st Generation: Analysis of Design Products

In our efforts to understand how designers work, the first step was to look at what they make and analyze it. Naturally, the things that designers produce are usually referred to as ‘design products’. This is slightly confusing since it applies even in cases where the design result is not a ‘product’ in its usual sense. For example, buildings, cars, fashion items and even services are considered design products. As an example from architectural design, an innumerable number of people have studied the building produced by the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. To be able to create such masterpieces, we want to understand what makes them so unique. By analyzing Wright’s works, researchers were able to extract certain principles which characterize his building, and the architect himself. 

While such analyses were often done manually, various computational tools and approaches have emerged to support it. One key example for this is the Shape Grammar approach, which focuses on explaining design styles. Shape Grammar assumes that designs in a certain style follow the same set of rules or principles, which can be identified and formulated (these are called the “grammar” of the style). The image below shows an attempt to explain the work of the architect mentioned above, by finding a set of rules that can recreate his designs. Surprisingly, these rules can also create new designs in the same style!

Despite its significant contribution to understanding design, analysis of design products is limited in the sense that it cannot tell us enough about the thought process behind it. How did Frank Lloyd Wright come up with his principles? How strictly did he follow them and why? This leads us to the next generation of efforts to understand designers.

2nd Generation: Behavioral Observation

To understand anything, it's always a good idea to observe it. Behavioral observation may sound complicated, but it simply means that we record information about what designers think and do, and then analyze it. Various approaches for doing this were developed over the years. One of the most popular approaches is called “Protocol Analysis”. In this approach, we record what designers say when designing, which results in very long documents (protocols). Then, we compare the protocol with the designer’s actions, to understand their design process. 

Imagine an industrial designer sketching various alternatives for a new car then crossing one out while saying “this one is stylish but too costly to make”. The combination of seeing the designer's action (crossing out an option) and words (“costly”) help us understand the reason for making a design decision. By tracing many of these decisions, we can get a detailed picture of the design process, and learn more about the thought process behind it. 

Is this approach helpful for understanding what designers think? Yes. Is it perfect? Unfortunately no. For one, designers don’t alway know how to express what they are thinking in words. Moreover, they may not even be aware of what they thought while doing something. Worse yet, trying to explain your design process in words can change the way you design! This takes us to the next and current generation of studying designers’ minds.

3rd Generation: Physiological and Neural Observation

If we can’t get all the information from what designers produce or what they say about it, where else can we look? Interestingly, we can learn a lot about design by collecting information from designers’ bodies. One way to do so is to use eye tracking technology, which can record how our eyes move. For example, the image below shows the focus of an architectural designer when looking at a photo of a famous site in Tokyo called Daikanyama  - the highly focused areas are marked in red. Using this technology when designing can help us learn what caught the designer’s attention, and what didn’t.

There are many ways to collect bodily data beyond eye tracking. For example, we can track our heart rate, sweat and more. Another fascinating approach in this generation is that of collecting and analyzing data from designers’ brains. Technologies such as EEG help us monitor how neurons in the brain fire, and find areas which are activated during certain design tasks. For example, we can compare different design methods by letting designers use them and record their brain activity when they do so. One of the key difficulties with this approach is to interpret the data, which is often very noisy and needs to be “cleaned” before anything meaningful can be found.

Studying the Design Mind: A Final Note

The evolution of approaches for studying how designers think and create was presented in generations, which may imply that switching to a new approach means making progress, and that older approaches have become outdated, but nothing is farther from the truth. For example, monitoring a designer’s brain can give you a lot of information about brain areas which are active on a physiological level, but can rarely explain the reasons behind the designer’s actions. Contrary, Protocol Analysis can give information about reasoning, but not about the brain areas which are employed for making a decision or acting upon it. This means that developing a complete picture of the design mind will require us to integrate the various approaches, as well as develop new ones which go beyond current knowledge and technological means.